Glückauf! Glückauf!

On 21 December 2018, the curtain fell on two centuries of tradition in underground, hard-coal mining in Germany. Dr Sabine Witt, a curator at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, had a timely opportunity in the summer of 2018 to go down a pit and learn about life working underground. The DHM has received a number of mining-related items as donations from RAG AG, the operator of the Prosper-Haniel mine – Germany’s last hard-coal mine – before it shuttered operations. To mark this donation, Sabine Witt reports on her underground tour, describing work procedures in the mine and the objects that have recently joined the DHM’s collection to represent Germany’s heavy-industrial past.